The extreme drought has lowered levels in Lake Travis, exposing formations not seen for some time.
Let’s say you live next to one of the Highland Lakes in Central Texas. And let’s say you have an expansive lawn that needs lots of water. Couldn’t you just run a line from your sprinkler to the lake and pump water out to keep your lawn green? Sure, you could do that. But you’d be breaking state law.
Drawing water from the lakes is a practice that’s been common for some time, but residents may not be able to get away with it for much longer. In a move they hinted at a few weeks back, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) announced Monday that they are going to “begin reporting residents who pump water from the Highland Lakes without a contract to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which can levy fines for the illegal pumping.”
The LCRA estimates that “5,000 residents use pumps to pull water from the lakes for lawn watering and other uses in or around their homes,” using around 5,000 acre-feet of water a year. That’s over 1.3 billion gallons of water. The community of Spicewood Beach, by comparison, which recently ran dry, used almost 39 million gallons of water last year. The city of Austin used nearly 145,000 acre-feet of water last year, or about 47 billion gallons.
Of those 5,000 people pumping water out of the lake, the LCRA says that 2,000 of them have contracts, but more than 3,000 continue the practice without a contract. It was even worse a few years ago. In 2009, only 60 of those estimated 5,000 people had the proper contracts.
So how are they going to start reporting residents who are sucking water with their own straws? Continue Reading →
The Highland Lakes have come dangerously close to reaching historic lows during the drought.
Thousands of gallons of water are trucked in each day to keep the taps flowing in Spicewood Beach
Although Spicewood Beach sits on Lake Travis, falling lake levels have led the community to run dry.
Longtime resident L.J. Honeycutt says TK.
Receding waters have ravaged communities in the Highland Lakes.
A volunteer “security guard” goes on patrol in Spicewood Beach
Dr. Jack Sharp studies hydrology at UT’s Jackson School.
Will Silver Creek Village be the next town to run dry during the Texas drought?
Nelson Brock works for the community water system in Silver Creek Texas, He’s watched wells dry up as nearby lake Buchanan recedes.
Residents in Silver Creek Village worry their wells, which depend on Lake Buchanan, will soon run dry.
After a year of record-breaking heat and drought, it began to seem inevitable that a town in Texas would run dry. What might have come as a surprise is that the town would have a name like “Spicewood Beach.”
“We didn’t get any warning!” said Robert Salinas on a recent afternoon.
It’s an example of the way the Texas drought is throwing into question the usefulness of old distinctions between surface water from Texas lakes and rivers, and groundwater from Texas wells.
If it happened at Spicewood Beach, could it happen to another Highland Lake well?
The current drought in Texas, which broke single-year records, has shown dramatic abatement in recent months as rains surprised the state. It was supposed to be a drier-than-average winter, but thankfully forecasts can be wrong.
Maybe you’re curious to see how far Texas has to go before things get back to “normal?” Quite a way. These three maps from the National Drought Monitor show the progression (and, hopefully, regression) of the drought, from its beginning in October 2010, to its arguable peak in October of the following year, to the improved-but-far-from-out-of-the-woods condition we find ourselves in today:
When it comes to beef production, Texas is at the top. There are twice as many cows in the state as Nebraska, the second biggest cattle-producing state. But after the devastating effects of the drought, with agricultural losses estimated in the billions, hay prices nearly tripling and massive selloffs of cattle, will Texas be able to make a comeback?
Ranchers sold off cattle in droves last year, sending prices temporarily lower as beef flooded the market. The United States Department of Agriculture says the number of cattle in Texas dropped by 10 percent in 2011. That’s an especially large decline when you consider Texas is the biggest beef producer in the country.
One livestock economist tells Bernier that there are fewer cows now in the country than there’s been in fifty years. Many cattlemen in Texas are now facing the big question: take their young cows and sell them off, assuming the drought will continue? Or keep them and breed them for more cattle, believing the drought will soon end? Continue Reading →
Dr. Cliff Frohlich of the University of Texas at Austin is researching the links between fracking and earthquakes.
Accidents at drilling sites, new links between fracking and earthquakes, and a farewell party for La Niña (the main culprit behind the current Texas drought) were among our readers’ favorite stories over the last week. In case you missed them, here are the top five new StateImpact Texas stories:
Mark Your Calendars for La Niña’s Farewell Party: When will the drought end? It’s truly too soon to say, but one of the main culprits, La Niña, is going to be leaving us soon. But there’s a catch.
A case before the Texas Supreme Court could have big consequences for landowners and pipeline companies.
The Texas Supreme Court could decide by later this week if it will reconsider its opinion on the use of eminent domain by companies to take private land. At issue: companies that want to build pipelines to transport oil and gas as the need surges with increased drilling.
Those companies say the opinion the Court issued last August is now allowing the owners of private land to hold pipeline companies “hostage” and “extort” money from them.
In a petition filed by a pipeline company ETC NGL Transport, the company contends that “without the right of eminent domain, acquiring easements is a much more lengthy and expensive process—if it can be done at all.”
In a petition filed by the Texas Oil and Gas Association (TXOGA), the group predicts there will be “a devastating impact on an industry that serves as the economic engine for the State’s economy.”
A water hauler readies a pump to hook up to Spicewood Beach's system.
It’s been a few weeks since the small community of Spicewood Beach, which about 1,100 people call home, ran out of water. It was the first town to run dry during the Texas drought.
Since then, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), which owns and operates the wells in the town, has been paying an outside contracter to truck in water. That cost the LCRA $200 a load, and at anywhere from four to five loads a day, costs were adding up. (The LCRA has come under fire for selling over 1.3 million gallons from the wells last year to water haulers before the wells started to fail.)
But as of today, the LCRA has its own truck. An 18-wheel, 6,000 gallon behemoth that will make its way from a private water system about ten miles away to the tanks in Spicewood. The LCRA has had the truck for a while, but first had to teach its team how to drive it.
“The streets around Spicewood Beach are pretty tight, they’re pretty narrow,” says LCRA Water Operations Manager Ryan Rowney. “I want to make sure that my staff is fully aware and fully versed in how the truck operates, the turning radiuses. Just want to make sure that they feel comfortable operating this bigger truck, cause it’s much bigger than what we’ve been driving around.”
But Spicewood Beach residents are worried that this bigger truck will wreak havoc on their roads and potentially damage their property. Continue Reading →
Mysterious messages about the drought popped up around the UT campus Thursday evening.
Yesterday evening on the way home from work, the above note was found on the windshield of one of our cars. Another was found on the car of a KUT News reporter, our local radio partners.
There was 0.01 inches of rain recorded there in September, a big departure from normal. On each of the days listed on the note, there was no rain recorded. On average, ABIA gets about two-and-a-half inches of rain during that month. So to correct our tipster: the drought was in no way “neutralized” in September, though recent rains have allowed much of  Travis County to move from “exceptional” and “extreme” to “severe” drought .
But there may be trouble on the horizon. In a news release Thursday, Parks and Wildlife warned of rising detections of a new algae bloom, Dinophysis in Port Aransas. While the bloom is not toxic like red tide, it is consumed by oysters and makes them inedible, according to the department. While that bay is not open to harvesting, the algae has also been found further up the coast.
A dock sits on the dried up bed of the Pedernales River in Travis County, Texas.
Stop me if you’ve heard this question before: When will the drought end?
It’s truly too soon to say, but there are some indicators that one of the main culprits, La Niña, is going to be leaving us soon.
What is La Niña? It’s a weather pattern where the surface temperatures are cooler in the Pacific, which creates drier, warmer weather in the southern U.S. (You may also know her counterpart, El Niño, which generally has the opposite effect.) La Niña sticks around for a year, sometimes longer, and tends to return once every few years. (The last La Niña was in 2007, but it was a much lighter one.)
The National Weather Service says today that a “majority of models predict La Niña to weaken through the rest of the Northern Hemisphere winter 2011-12, and then to dissipate during the spring 2012.” This jibes with previous forecasts.
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